This year me and @Alex were visiting the 2018 Maker Faire in Berlin together, we've met some youtubers, people known in the hackadayverse, saw some awesome projects and had a lot of fun!

Something that surprised me and made my day: I got recognised from last year where we did the unofficial hackaday.io community stand! I even got a little present as a thank you for when I gave him some PCBs and a hackaday prize shirt.

well, who needs one anyways? I plan on backing up stuff from here with the help of the API. My old content is converted to the new "engine". Everything is now backed up in github, I have version control and am able to rework some content.

Please keep in mind that I was able to participate in some test runs and beta tests, some anecdotes are hidden in this write up. They're definitely safe to try out :)

I've met @Felix Plitzko at the MakerFaire Hannover this year and we've talked about boards that AISLER has already made for the company I work for. Felix told me he likes the #LAMEBOY and offered me a free round of boards and a metal stencil to compare. Here is an overview of their service compared to OSH Park. They don't make it a secret that OSH Park is definitely an inspiration.

The first picture shows a round of the first version of Lameboy, some parts are replaced now or moved or deleted (kind of sad about the steel stencil). I swear I replaced the OSH Park logo on the AISLER boards with an AISLER appropriate text, but I must have mixed files up. You can see a yellow "x- out" sticker, where I currently have no idea what it means, but the board's pads look pretty pierced, may be from electrical testing? The typical "byte marks" on the OSH Park boards (7 here) are sometimes slightly in the board, AISLER gives you a clean bulge.

As you can see here the OSH Park silkscreen had some issues in this 0.8mm run, the C and RST labels of the buttons aren't printed well, where as the AISLER board is slightly offset to the bottom, so the OFF and ON Lines are cut in. The eyes of the skull look bigger on the AISLER board.

In the second round of the OSH Park boards (as seen on the right of the following image) there are no errors in the silkscreen though.

The stencil of AISLER is looking pretty good, position it right and you can see only gold.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the quality of the boards since day one, but I also had some bad luck with orders. On my very first run of boards for the company I work for, I had the ground plane peeking out next to every pin, never happened with any other board manufacturer but was my fault and I could have seen it in the high resolution renders on the page. Since then they did a lot of magic to process the boards before they go in production. They seem to constantly update and upgrade their services and product, which is great if you think about it, but it might happen that you get a wild outline or your order of a "non public test run of steel stencils" (!) gets lost in an excel file :D (they don't use excel for that, now that it's public!!) But as with OSH Park the staff is communicative and interested in how they can improve and make it easier for you to make things. They're also in the process of adding PCB assembly to their services.

Their page gives you version management and the option to change board designs up until manufacturing begins, something that one person or another might miss in OSH Park (although production at OSH Park starts way sooner due to higher demand and a nice mail to support@oshpark.com might fix file problems). If they manage to nail the "order 3 complete prototypes" then AISLER would win the hearts by a lot of people, IMHO.

So I thought that my LiPo Chargers in form of 4056 modules are all weird, broken and not powerful enough, until I've noticed that my UNI-T UT61E multimeter isn't calibrated anymore(?)! Stupid me also calibrated other stuff like my Power Supply made from a buck down converter and a notebook PSU using that meter. I also thought my R8D8 power bank was off big time and the batteries were done, because I've continuously measured 3.8V on each cell with that multimeter... meh. Cheap multimeter now tells me I'm stupid. meh.

Anyone any tips for voltage references? Or how I can recalibrate voltage without another multimeter?

[update] I've seem to programmed all my attiny13 for #FLUX capacitor trinket with 13V instead of 12V, thanks to my multimeter... meh. but hey, they work.

Trying to make [this] work with the Arduino IDE on a Wemos D1 Mini. The additional capacitor got loose, so that there were fluctuations in one row. One row seems to be dead now, after I tried to resolder the QFN chip with my soldering iron. Instead of fiddeling around with that anymore, I finally got around to fix my hot air station. One of the 230V cables was crimped wrong, there was still some isolation where there should have been the blank cable, I wonder why it ever worked at first. There's a DIP Atmega8L inside - funky.

Four Euros for a 16 channel, 24MHz logic analyzer is a pretty good investment. At least that's what I thought when I read this article on hackaday.com in 2012. It talks about the LCSOFT mini board being a clone of a Saleae 8 Channel logic analyzer, but with the help of the open source software sigrok it can be much more. Sigrok itself is a command line interface only program, but together with pulseview I think you will have the same experience as with the Saleae devices + software.

You just have to make it work first, especially when you're on a Mac. I've written a nightly rant the other day, but here I'm trying to compress the essentials to make it work.

Once upon a time I bought a - CY7C68013A dev board [https://sigrok.org/wiki/Lcsoft_Mini_Board], because I read that one could use this shiny cheap thing with the fancy Saleae Software and it actually thinks it's one of their fancy equipment. I never really got it to work though (lack of experience, definitely). Skip forward 4 years and I thought to myself, this time I could make it work. Taking it with me on a vacation, I tried to make it work on a Raspberry PI, fooled around with the firmware, got frustrated, you guessed it, back in the drawer.

Now I'm fuzzing around with the Game Boy and thought that a logic analyzer would come in very handy, talked to guys in the #Hack Chat and gave it another try, this time with the open source program sigrok and their beautiful pulseview (you want that, not just the command line!) - side note: I'M ON A MAC.

Do this and you should be fine with a non-tinkered or vacation-flashed EEPROM. Otherwise you're in trouble again, my friend. When I fired up my CYWHATEVER module with the jumper set, I got the module recognized as a Saelae 8 Channel device, but when I tried the 16-channel version, it failed on me. Hmm, bad. So I had to flash the EEPROM somehow with something. K.

You need a little program called fxload. I found a guy that ported cypress fx2 stuff to work with mac and another guy that wrote a "tutorial", but before the first guy moved the folder in the git. So here's how I "managed" to make it work.

I'm not sure if the linking part is correct, I had to unlink and use a direct link from where I downloaded it into. The thing is, xcodebuild will probably fail on you, if you haven't installed the 2GB+ xcode. If you have that, open the downloaded files / main.m and wait for a "we need to fix stuff" - yellow warning thing that you can push, this will fix the issue with a missing path to osx10.5 library thing. After that you should be finally able to use the xcodebuild command (I'm not an xcode guy).

So "luckily" the guys of sigrok offer a firmware file for everything and we're ready to go, right? Wrong. They're actually something else, you need a hex file for that, and as they say: "To flash the firmware, you will need a hex file containing the firmware, fx2lafw-cypress-fx2.ihx. Since the hex file is a byproduct of the build, you will need to build the firmware from sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw sources".

I tried to download the sigrok firmware part and compile it, so I can get the needed hexfile, that is not in the precompiled firmware folder. Bummer. But the './configure' script broke down on me, wanting a "sdcc-sdcclib", so I finally gave up and tried googling again, before firing up my rPI. Here is where I found my hexfile "fx2lafw-cypress-fx2.ihx":

I'm currently selling things on eBay, just throwing out what would collect dust otherwise. There's currently no international shipping planned, but if someone reaaaaally needs stuff from my oh so small list, tell me and we can find a solution. I hope it's not too bold to advertise something like this, but hey - it has to pay the hobby ;) Should I sell something else, while I'm on it? Any PCBs or Kits?

There's a total f'up with the wiring of the power lines, the fix can be found in the image "wI40iZV.jpg" of this thread, that I'm very happy to have found. I'm not embedding the pic because I haven't asked for permission and don't want to create an account there.

Sometimes you just want that special extra protection for your future projects (or dreams of them) or maybe you need a nice purpose for those old or faulty boards that are cluttering your drawers - if so - I might have a solution for you:

So why did I buy this? It just reminds me of this websites logo, so why not turn it into a badge or combine it with an ESP8266 and write a little notifier for skulls (or likes) on projects. I still wan't to play around with the API of hackaday.io some more.

There are already two or three lists I've put and ignore here, but I don't care. I just went through all my projects to see what I might have neglected for long enough now and sometimes I just forget what I was up to, merging ideas and project is also a good thing to not get too crazy about losing / forgetting / neglecting stuff, so here's my ToDo.

I went through the trouble of adding lights for my over head camera rig :) a little 3D print for the plug and switch was chemically welded with acetone to the existing foot. The metal beams are from a recycled IKEA lamp, to keep it hipster, the LED strip is a off of eBay for one Euro.

This is my write up of how I made the cheap Chinese knockoff xbox chatpad to work for me.

After watching one of Ben Hecks classics - "Build a Retro Computer: BASIC 80's Pocket Computer"[link] I bought the cheapest on eBay I was able to find (as always), but quickly found out that they aren't the same and as easily reprogrammable. A bit frustrated I left this in a drawer for a while, until recently, where I was looking for a good portable keyboard for my #Portable Raspberry PI Zero project. So my solution was to add an Arduino Pro Micro with an Atmega32u4 on it, that has native USB and is also to find on a Teensy 2.0. I had to remove the IC blob on the Keyboard PCB first, to make sure it wouldn't be powered by the row scanning and crosstalk, then hooked up the Arduino to the test points. I also worked out some modifiers but got lazy with the green ones.

I'm currently 'researching' keyboard options for a portable raspberry pi device. So far I have an old cheap chinese bluetooth keyboard, some 4x4 keypads and an xbox controller and I'm not happy. Without screw holes -that were on the eBay listing pics- I can't mount those 4x4 boards anywhere and I don't like the pressure I have to apply to the switches. The BT board I might be able to hack in to, but after failing with the chatpad I feel slightly "meh" about it.

After a fatal waste of hours I gave up debugging a cheap Chinese xbox chatpad. It doesn't want to talk to me and it's not the PIC chip version one could reprogram, so my only option right now would be to remove the chip and throw on an atmega/arduino on there and scan it myself. Since they're cheap to get on eBay I still might do that at some point, but I came up with something else. Thanks to the very good google picture search result position that hackaday.io always gets, I felt compelled to add this massive text overlay. But I have to linkdrop this for all the guys who bought original quality M$ stuff - http://cliffle.com/project/chatpad/ - it might work for you guys.

[UPDATE] mapped out TPs and Letters and stuff and wrote arduino sketch for pro micro

Instead I designed a little board that's inspired by the nokia 5510 - this cellphone has a "full" qwerty keyboard, 24 buttons on the left and 21 buttons on the right side of the display. So having two boards of this 4x5+3 keys equipped with the (way too heavy) buttons that I want to replace might be a good start. It also has diodes against ghosting - should have added a ghostbusters logo on there. Damn. Next rev.

I don't like indents in my finger from pushing a button - so does anyone have any other options? I'm running out of Ben Heck portables episodes.

While working long hours wishing for some time to tinker again, I was shopping a lot of stuff the last two or three months. So once again I will compile a list of projects I might tackle in the future. This list is also for me because I forget things I have.

MQTT stuff

First up is the world clock with plenty of 1602 Displays I've ordered recently. Then there is this 5m red LED strip that I plan to control via a 'redAlert' command over MQTT. A wheather station would be nice too and some logging on the PI, although I'm still skeptical on logging stuff on the same SD card where the OS is. With the 4 relay module from eBay I want to see if I can hook it up to an ESP8266 despite the relais being 5V, probably yes.

Raspberry PI media recorder / alexa

4 USB microphones and 4 USB soundcards were supposed to help me get alexa running on a PI zero or record 4 input lines simultaneously with the help of JACK (I've done that before with linux)

Raspberry PI zero handheld

Most of the time when I think of what I would have wanted to do with my Game Boy, this Idea pops up, where I use it as a remote or surf the Internet - having a cartridge with embedded WIFI in it. This would mean programming something to program the Game Boy / running a client from a ROM that also pulls stuff from the internet etc. Way too complicated, so I will try to hack up a thing similar to Ben Hecks Raspberry PI Zero Portable Computer. Soon my third pi zero will arrive here, so it's time to throw one into something. Some empty Game Boy Advance shells for under 5 Euros found their way to my place, too. Still thinking about the im-me messenger so I have to throw in a radio module at least.

A MAN2A / TIL305 watch comes to mind, a cheap click tracker converted to a frequency counter, a mobile color TV converted to a PI display, arduino VGA ported to ESP8266 (out of skills?), maybe some analog stuff again. Man my lightsaber needs some work too, like most of my projects.

Cons and Faires

MakerFaire Berlin and 33c3 are the next cons I'm planning to visit, sadly no Hackaday super conference this year for me.

Work related

I've designed my biggest board yet recently, basically an Arduino pro micro shield :D but with RJ45 connectors for RFid modules and a display. There are also optocouplers and an ENC28J60 is on there. It's 10x10 cm's, I've cheated with vias to get terminal screws outside of the 8x10cm eagle restriction and overall I'm pretty happy with it.

So when my dad told me that the 5 diodes on a pcb were going for 15 to 18 Euros on eBay I thought to myself - why don't I try that too :D thanks to eBay and PCBs from dirtypcbs.com I'm at a material cost of 50ct or so. On sunday I'll test them.

Whenever I visit my parents, something new almost always awaits me in my dad's "laboratory". I will share some pics and videos here, because I like what he builds and wan't to share it. Taking this whole youtube thing a notch further, here is an 'on phone' edited video, dubbed with an MacGyver inspired theme I played my self, to set the mood. My dad builds stuff since forever and I remember the long explanations I got as a kid, where I zoned out because I couldn't keep up, but didn't want him to know.

So for the last few weeks I had to solder with a discounter soldering station that I've bought for 15 Euros. It's basically a screwdriver, heated by the power of mains, hidden in a big clunky green case.

Before that I had a trusty Weller WM15L soldering iron with that I soldered all the SMD stuff and more, but especially with bigger thermal mass objects I ran into some problems. When I was noticing that the tip went from workable to bad and ugly, I tried to change the tip, but the heavily corroded screw just broke. I think I've paid 15-20 Euros for this soldering iron. In essence it also was a tiny screwdriver heated by mains, but a better one. It's also the same one that made me jump when I was soldering stuff in Marrakesh that might have been live. Scary throwback.

I was waiting to buy a hakko FX888 that was on sale on watterott for 130 Euros, but when the budget was there it was sold out - meh. So I ended up searching for hakko 936 clones instead and found one for 42 Euros. The important features for me were that the tip/iron were changeable and that I won't run out of spare parts, even though the hakko is not supported anymore, eBay is flooded with cheap stuff for it.

I have a bad motivator and some broken energy cells to fix. I see a lot of repeated hacks, that I have never done myself and yet I feel tired looking at all of them and everything related with soldering. Maybe this is because of my work that takes a lot of time and energy at the moment, or that my soldering station for 10bugs is worth nothing and it's just no fun to solder! I'm also short breathed more than I'm willing to admit.. meh.

So I made a new youtube channel for my hacking / repairing / soldering / "german curse word tutorials" videos under https://www.youtube.com/davedarko . Thoughts and ideas are appreciated, I'm going to use this channel to showcase my projects in more detail and leave the other channel for private stuff like making music and vlogging and so on...

Just in case someone was wondering why I got silent for a while, this is what I've been working on the past days - printing will start on 31st of december. In total 17 parts to print and one order at OSHpark! Once I have printed everything I'll probably geek out and do some LED stuff and gyro/acc sound generating experiments.

Happy holidays to every one and if you haven't seen Star Wars yet - I honestly don't know what to say to you :)

As a patron on patreon.com for James Brutons channel I paid enough to get mentioned in a video :D Actually the amount you have to pay is very low and I pay it for more than a year now - and not because I wanted to be featured! I actually deleted my comment 5 minutes after posting, but he must have seen it and put me in anyway :) The following projects are featured:

I had to merge my "lab" with my living room to make space for a future flatmate. That means I pull all my projects from their dark, lost corners and places, see their flaws and want to revisit them. Like some of you told me, I was not really going to use it, since it was way too loud, big and other good reasons. Some weeks ago I got some old laptops with 19V PSUs and I thought that with the regulator I bought this would make a good PSU instead. With a ten-turn potentiometer and a 4euro voltage and ampere meter display it could get quite useful.

The wiring was a bit tricky, I will need to write it down or make a sketch for it. There's also a 3D printed case (almost) now!

Still recovering from that weekend. My first maker faire, a "have to", because it was in Berlin, my hometown.

Friday night I was meeting with @WooDWorkeR, @Sophi Kravitz, @Elliot Williams and @al1 at the c-base. Shamefully I have to admit that this was my first trip to the space station based in Berlin, a meet-up place for computer friends, aliens, geeks and nerds and guys with no labels and categories. The tour offered some inspirations for new hacks and we've seen the #warpcore go crazy. Two notable projects that stuck in my head were the little speaker box, that made spherical noises when picking up magnetic fields (telephone amp by a company called micro-electric) and the 4 EL-Wire tube that looked like it was pulsing (no pictures were allowed to be taken, sry). We met other guys that wanted to check out the c-base before going to the maker faire and had a great time.

Saturday I've met @al1 at the Ostbahnhof station near the Postbahnhof to go to the maker faire. Greeted by a fire throwing container robot we entered the first floor where some were still preparing their tables. I'm working through the flyers, they aren't in order.

MakerBeam

The first thing that got me interested was the MakerBeam starter kit. There was definitely a lot inside, different length of 1cm x 1cm extruded aluminum profiles with a threaded hole all the way through and multiple connectors to create presentable prototypes.

www.hacklace.info - a tiny orange 8x8 matrix driven by an atmega328, arduino compatible - everything in a necklace form factor. I was close to buying one but have so many displays in that size, that I would be angry with my self. Another interesting device was the word clock by www.kellys-finest.de that were designed with common ebay classics like a chead arduino clone, 2 8x8 matrices with max7219 controller and a DS1307 module. And there was this beauty:

Pimoroni

they brought a lot of hats (shields, stacking stuff) for the raspberry PI and they might have thought that I was writing for hackaday.com - I had to wear a HaD shirt. There was a lot of RGB stuff going on!

http://i.materialise.com - first price test looks like prices of only 25% percent of shapeways for plastics. MeltWerk had some interesting prints as well, with prices around 75% of shapeways, tested with the same object. If you have a lot of LEGO parts, a browser and not so much time to wait for your 3D prints, you might want to take a look at www.brickify.it - there you can replace easy structures with LEGO parts to save time.

freie Maker

I'm printing myself right now - thanks to the guys from http://freie-maker.de - they brought a 3D scanner and scanned everyone who was interested - should have pulled in my belly :D After scanning a receipt with a link was printed and you have full control over the data. Awesome! We also met @Mario Lukas there and had a little chat.

Seems like I have to build a captain Kirk chair sooner or later. Although you know you bought it cheap, it's always disturbing to know that a chair just broke under your weight. I'm thinking of a chair using rollers you'd see on a shopping cart, a rotating base using skateboard wheels and a total comfy seat and arms that have control knobs that do stuff.

When I saw the #Nixie inspired display last week I once again fell in love with LEDs faking Nixie displays. The copper colored cage is awesome, the reflections on the inner walls and the wire mesh looks fantastic. Great job!

CHANGE LOG

2015-02-18 added pcb section

2015-02-17 first draft

INTRODUCTION

While I was looking on eBay for alphanumeric displays, I stumbled across 9 of those displays and had to buy them for about 10EURs all together. I didn't know anything about them but I was all in at that time, because I was thinking about doing a "back to the future" timer circuit at that time. I will use this page to collect all the data and informations I found on those and how I will use them and what for later on. There are 8 displays that are labeled with KW-104AL but number nine has "PINLITE 0-64 28564" on one side and "X-2393 8525" written on it.

CHANGE LOG

2015-02-17 Joined with update page

2015-02-14 first version

INTRODUCTION

So I designed a circuit, without making a pcb and sending it to OSHPark today. First I want to make sure, if what I've done is correct or not and right now I'm too confused and tired to tell. And if so, I'm going to breadboard it and use some perfboard or design the pcb and try to etch it myself. I'm too spoiled. There is so much BS on the web, how you would have to connect an ULN2803 to LEDs and so on. Has anyone any complaints or hints for me? My plan is to loop through each column and set the shift registers. Latch off while switching the rows. This is supposed to be the prototype controller for the displays I made in:

I guess I was a bit ÜBERmotivated. Excuse my german. So the plan was to get 4 ports with switchable voltages. But the connectors for banana plugs were that big, that I decided to use three wires on one.

This is definitely a temporary design, I've already worked on the 2nd version of it (with not so many banana plug terminals and will hopefully be able to get it laser cut somewhere. Maybe I'll throw in a USB plug.

The result so far... well... I got one port with 3/4 channels or the other way around. And maaaaaan, this old supply is loud.

I'm not sure how hot the resistors are allowed to get, but I'm planning some heat absorption and involving a fan to keep those monsters cool(er(ish)). The gauge of the wires is set to accept around 1.5A but I used 2 wires for safety reasons.

My usual way to power something with 5V? An old cell phone power supply. My usual way to power something with 3.3V? An old cell phone power supply, connected to a 3.3V arduino micro. That has to stop, so I asked my dad for an old power supply he surely had laying around and ordered some parts on the usual places. The plan is to use the 12V, 5V and 3.3V as seen before on so many places. Additionally, there will be a variable output controlled by a LM2595(ebay) with a LED display voltage meter (ebay). Now I just have to wait for the copper chicken head knob for the 10k resistor and the resistor itself, but nothing that should hold me from starting, though. *While writing thinking edit*: I need those min load capacitors. Sounds like some really tough math to get involved to.

No such things as 5 ohm I could find, so I'm looking for 4.7 ohms.

Yeah, I just wanted to play with the latex feature, I admit it :D Next on is the wattage.

I ended up buying LSR-120/20, LSR-33/10 and LSR-47/10, they are not the cheapest, but I could get them all from one seller and hope on some combined shipping costs, thanks ebay, for finally making this possible. I'll use some plywood to place the ports, the display, power good led and the potentiometer - and should not forget the switch.

Well, so much for planning, not the best page I wrote, but it's supposed to be more a log this time - a note to the future me. That's why I gave it the title. Why do I explain something self-explaining? I'm tired.

First let me apologize for the pictures, I was too lazy to grab my DSLR so my "trusty" Samsung Galaxy S2 had to be enough.

So let's dive into my adventure with SMD soldering with a toaster oven. I had all I would need to test this method myself. The boards were send by OSHPark, my cyan LEDs I've ordered years(!) ago and the solder paste. But my syringe wasn't actually a syringe you would expect but one with a 3mm opening - d'uh - let's not hit 1x2mm spots with that. So I got creative with a 3D printing nozzle - which made quite a mess but worked probably better than without.

Then I went on putting solder paste on 180 spots with this crude device.What a boring task. But hey, all for science!

I had to get those LEDs out of the strip and figured out how they are oriented. But once I tried, they almost every time jumped out and I had to first find them and then check the polarity again. Hours later it was time for my trusty toaster oven. I have no special controller nor a temperature sensor - just a google search where I found this page http://www.openhardware.net/Misc_Stuff/ToasterSMD/ and figured I would have to turn the oven on for about 3 1/2 minutes. I'm sorry science.

I'm kind of jumping to the end here, because I did them one by one and took no photos. They are not perfectly aligned through the process but far better then I could have soldering them by hand ;) That's actually from my DSLR because I switched while writing.

And this is my first attempt from years ago, which demotivated me for some time now. This board is self etched and pre tinned by hand - soldering those LEDs was nearly impossible.

Next up will be color coded pin headers for the cathode and anode rows, since I always forget what is what. Yes, lame, I know. But wait, that doesn't even matter with those little guys. Damn. Never mind, I mix up cathodes and anodes. So what.

So today the boards arrived from OSHPark and I will put all the stuff together on sunday and throw it into my toaster oven, hoping for the best! As seen before those boards have quite obvious markings, since the LEDs do lack that - I hope for the best that they are facing the same direction in this strip and I can work with a predefined arrangement. I should pre test the LEDs once they are placed and connected by the paste. Maybe I should even test the toaster oven with some spare parts and protoboard first. Probably best.

So what should I do with the boards, once they are all perfectly fine (fingers crossing)? I though about a wrist watch, since I don't have a space ship that jumps out of stargate stargate range. I'm not even sure about how I would drive them, only that it would take me 18+5 or 15+6 Pins to control 90 LEDs. It's not that different from my #1886. fixietube clock setup.

I also ordered 4 MMR-70 and plan on programming them, but I don't have a 3.3v programmer, so I might move this to some point later. At least one 8-Bit Eduard Anatoljewitsch Chil should come out of this, using only the atmega32 onboard. Thanks to @Dr Salica and his wonderful project #3508. Portable Trollmaster 3000 for the inspiration!

My IKEA expedit 5x5 is currently a mess and I plan on getting some curtains for the lower 3 rows and make the upper ones a display area, showing all my nerdy creations, maybe with on and off switches in the front to turn the projects on and off. There is at least the K.I.T.T. scanner I build years ago, my stargate LEGO diorama needs some LEDs, then there is the doctor who "area" and a star wars section as well. Add some lights and all is set for a while.

With my flatmate moving out I now have a whole room I can use as my work space for soldering and hacking, 3D printing and crafting. So a workbench and a proper power supply setup up will be coming soon. 3 containers with little boxes for small parts arrived 2 weeks ago and I started to throw in all my electronic stuff I have - looking good. The boxes are transparent and I got a matrix of 15x8 out of it - so there is a hacking opportunity for organizing parts (or another watch project - meh). Combine that with voice recognition and finally my questions like "where are those damn arduinos again?" will be answered with a little blinking LED. Would be even better if the boxes were coded somehow, so I can throw them in where I want and it will always find them.

Almost three years ago I bought some 0805 cyan LEDs to make a tiny stargate inspired display. Since I haven't figured out any markings and wasn't able to hand solder them the project was on ice. Last week I've revisited the idea and designed some pcbs that are fool proof in terms of orientation making it easy to place LEDs in one direction without knowing anode or cathode. With some solder paste and my toaster oven I hope to achieve a good result ending with 3 boards - hours - minutes - seconds - that I will put on some perfboard arduino/74hc595 timer/watch thing.

Raspberry Pi Stuff

Plans for an arduino based raspberry pi shield are forming, I definitely want some goodies on there like controlling ws2812b, 5V fan controller (yes a fan...), 433mHz module connector, SD card logger, current measurements, reset button, shutting down button. Kind of bummed out that my raspberry crashes when I make a picture with the camera module and ssh is poorly slow.

My raspberry pi setup was meant to somewhat satisfy my needs for a computer on my vaccation while my macbook battery would be replaced in the mean time. But somehow it always fried and frustrated the hell out of me. I think that is because of my insufficient power supply - 1A could be a bit to weak for a b512 with wifi and a hub. So I googled on my tablet pc how I could measure amps with an arduino and found this site http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/arduino/current/current.htm - ordered some 0.05ohm resistors and plan on using the integrated gain of the analog to digital converter to get a better resolution and store the data on a rolling array.

RGBW Flashringlight

For my 29th birthday and christmas I got myself a dslr - with generating youtube videos and project documentation in mind (some nice sonic screwdriver long exposure pics are on the way). I would love to see how a ws2812b rainbow ringlight would look like, but i think the adafruit rings are too expensive. Ebay had some interesting leds, though /pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=261645486643&alt=web

Cypress Logic analyzer

Someday in 2011 there was a blogpost on hackaday [http://hackaday.com/2011/12/15/saleae-logic-analyzer-knockoff-hacking/ ] about a clone of the saleae logic analyzer and I bought a cy7c68013a dev board for under 10euros but never plugged it in. So with my raspberry working in console mode I fired up fxload and sigrok-cli but the ported versions were not the newest and compiling didn't work either so I wasted a lot of time on this... have to revisit that.

Game boy camera polaroid instant camera

this could get interesting - taking a printer module and a camera and merging it with an arduino to get an instant camera thing in a nintendo style. Ben Heck style maybe.

Good thing it was only a 7 Euro key-fob camera in 808 style, but I killed my time-lapse project with that. I wanted to wear this on the hackaday event taking pictures constantly with a harvested lipo from a macbook. I even shrunk it down from an arduino board plus perfboard and wire porn to a self-designed attiny85 board. While debugging one I must have killed the camera, because it won't take pictures or videos anymore - so I ordered a new one on ebay for 4 Euros. Btw., the boards were so tiny, that I didn't even get a sticker with them (I already have enough of them, nevermind). It is a bit messy to work with in eagle, but I like putting pads on the edge to solder the ISP connector sideways.

The wunderbar

The wunderbar comes in a package of 6 BTLE sensors of different types (temp, light sound...) and an embedded device that connects over wifi to the Open Sensor Cloud Platform. It aims to be an easy “Internet of Things” starter kit, where you don’t have to worry about the security and hardware since it has all been taken care of the relayr.io-team.

The beginning

On half past ten on friday, september 26th around 40 engineers, designers and developers gathered at the betahouse in Berlin to be welcomed by the relayr.io team for their first 24 hours hackathon around their product - the wunderbar. A brief introduction was given of what the idea behind the wunderbar is, how the communications and the hardware is setup and that the hashtag for this event would be #wunderhack. Deciding factors would be “quality of code” and “use of third party devices”. We the contestants introduced our ourselves and our ideas for projects.

The teams

Sensor driven canvas - Christophe, my colleague from wakesys.com and I are webdevelopers and wanted to augment an html5 canvas with sensor data from the wunderbar, which could be used for bargraphing, painting and gaming [webAPI]

Wundersound - Julian, Jose and Khaled pitched to use the sensors and a kinect to create sound or manipulate sound [iOS SDK]

GrannyVision - a monitoring device that tracks the health of a beloved elderly was presented by Chris, Simon and Steven [iOS SDK]

Saunopportunist - an idea I worked before on the hackday with Tracey, but together with Marcus and Falko the HERE Team refined their design and redid the software from scratch to build a sauna monitoring device and email alerts and android push notifications [webAPI]

NoNameIdea - Jan and Julian arrived without a project and turned their wunderbar color sensor into a colour caller for blind people [webAPI]

Babybico - Nabhila and Miha joined the hackathon with their baby sleep monitor app, they want to turn into a product [Android SDK]

Keybox - the keydock.co Team brought their product to research a way to integrate the wunderbar into their product to make use of NFC tags on the keys of their customers customers [Android SDK]

gestureBeacons - think of a scenario where a shopping window interface would let you swipe a beacon to rotate a mannequin to see a combination from behind and control a PHILIPS hue to see it in different colors [webAPI]

Supermap/Wunderbahn - scan your color coded station and your destination to get a charlie-plexed LED station matrix lead you the way, this idea was from Tito and Ema, who were joined by John [webAPI]

The hacking

Two hours in the contest and we created the github repository, found our libraries and tested our canvas with additional mouse events, while still waiting for a wunderbar. Turned out that so many wunderbars were present, that the “onboarding” process for the sensors failed (all SSIDs and BTLE names were the same) so every wunderbar had to be onboarded in a separate location. After 30 minutes with the wunderbar their cluster server broke down, but it was lunchtime and I was trying to burn the firmware on the Grove/Bridge module over BTLE afterwards. With no luck we had to ask the Team to do it again, the first time was for the color sensor to deactivate the onboard white LED, which was so bright that the color readings were wrong. Until half past ten the server was down, leaving everybody not able to work with the wunderbar for 9 hours. Not a good start for a contest all about the wunderbar!

But with all the hassle we still got our project to a surprisingly stable and presentable state over the following 15 hours. Post-wunderhacking the judges came in to watch each project presentation with the other contestants.

The results

Keybox realized early that the wunderbar was overkilling their product and used the time and atmosphere to brainstorm their product flow instead. Babybico actually managed to deliver an android app that also pushes data to a smart watch, when the accelerometer and microphone...

I won the fubarino a while ago on hackaday.com because I worked a little easter egg into a Game Boy Printer library for the arduino. The printing from code was a work around since I never got the serial running. I ran into problems though, trying to print more than 2 arrays of 640bytes and thought that while my code reached a compiled size of 8kb+ that my cheap chinese arduinos where just faking the 32kb and the code would not fit. Like any other project it went into a box until sunday some one contacted me on github and I got motivated to get into it again.

I tried 2 arduinos and again bricked them and had to install the bootloader over ISP, to get them working. At one time I started noticing jitters on the serial line. So I googled for maximum array sizes on a arduino and I finally found the problem and the solution. The atmega328 has 2kb of SRAM and this is where the values are stored, so having 3 x 640 (1920) bytes is definitely overkill.

Storing the picture in flash finally let me print up to ten rows of a picture, which was the maximum the printer could take before printing. But I wanted to be able to print endless pictures and after printing there was always a boarder of 3 rows and 1 row starting the next part. That was finally fixed when I found that the printing command contained the margin before and after the prints. With that fixed I was able to send multiple lines, but they were all just fired on the printer and only one row got out. Then I noticed, that Miles Burtons code wasn't waiting for the print to finish, so I copied the code from furrteks attiny code and bam, it worked with 17 lines of 640 bytes so far.

What an adventure! I'm not sure how I will proceed from here, I like the web based approach and don't want to make a processing app, working the algorithm again. So, internet of things stuff for a 16 year old printer anyone? Arduino and ENC26J80 maybe?

Seems like every month I stumble over an idea and can't get rid of it. This time of year I always get nostalgic and thought about using the fubarino as an cartridge reader and programmer for simple eeprom cartridges. I'm already developing a little board to start with the interface. I wonder if the fubarino could also act as an cartridge itself. Nice stuff to get started. I'm also interested in those memory bank controllers and how they work.

I had to make a part for the edge connector, great exercise! Although I'm not yet happy with it, because the pads aren't long enough. Wiring was a mesmerizing nightmare :D

And here is a list that comes in handy to resource games I could clone on this simple device. I have no idea what I am doing, but that is always the most interesting part.

Funny thing about the price, it would not matter if I order 3 eeproms and 3 oshpark boards vs. 10 eeproms and 10 dirtypcbs. Kind of strange, but there are more then 10 games out there with 32kb so worst case scenario would be having 10 games. But I also want to program stuff myself and hope to get some GPIOs working - get that wifi dongle http://hackaday.io/project/2879-ESP8266-WiFi-Module-Library to work :D - in theory you could get a controller pull your twitter feed, store it in ram and have a program read it out. Seems like a good amount of work and a long life project.

Another cool cartridge concept is to have an arduino library for it, and the gameboy would fetch data to display and safe the button states so the arduino knows what button is pressed. This way you could use it as a remote.

Maybe it is possible to come up with an mbc-1 clone to adress more memory.

A friend told me once that her flatmate wanted to build a LED cube and I was like "pfff, I can do that..". I started to look for LEDs and stuff I would need, but had so much stuff laying around, that I said "use the stuff you already have" and harvested LEDs from a LED array of a flash light and used some big copper wires for the frame. My first Atmega8 was directly soldered in a messy way on perfboard - I corrected the dimensions and burned the atmega8 bootloader on it (including the auto reset "circuit" for the ftdi adapter).

That was 10months ago. Yesterday I finally joined the atmega8 board with the LEDs and programmed a crappy animation on it. Sometimes it feels good to not over engineer stuff and just go with it.

TIP: if you have clear glass LEDs like me, use some white acrylic paint to diffuse them.

Yesterday I was chasing duo/bicolor LEDs on ebay.com because I read about blue/red ones on Reactron Integron for Automobile from Kenji Larsen. It never occurred to me that they weren't only red/green ones anymore. Inspired by this I made a 3x5 (15) LED matrix board with charlieplexed pinout in the hope I will be able to make a sometimes purple/red/blue display or colored temperature thingy. This will give me some coding experience since I have to come up with some array magic. I still haven't found out how I can tent the vias in eagle so OSHpark will add the solder stop mask over. The next iteration will probably have 1206 resistors on there and after that I'm going to order the 11*10 matrix I have already designed. This big matrix is perfect for a word clock project but I would need to check my software before. I'm also interested in a clock design as supposed to be seen here: http://hackaday.io/project/1480-Charlieplexed-LED-Clock this would need 9*8 (72) pins (60 for minutes and 12 for the hours) and a good positioning/addressing system.

So I took my bicycle out to my parents, about an hour ride and I noticed that it's quite embarrassing as a tinkerer not having my own arduino based bycicle computer. I've looked around the web and could not find something satisfying to start with, only a youtube video

The software seems to be a good starting point, but it's not complete and the hardware lacks at least a case and a pcb. So right now i'm collecting things one could do with an arduino based bycicle computer. Which information is relevant for me, what should it at least do, what could be nice to have etc.

I recently got distracted from everything when I saw a quantum device from the canadian show "continuum" on thingiverse.com and had to make my own version of it, because I wasn't happy with the file someone uploaded. So I made this; 8 different parts, holes for magnets for the snapping effect, researched wobble positions.

I have printed 6 1/2 parts right now. My printrbot simple intends to shift sometimes on the x axis so I had to stop the print and rip of the layers printed wrong. By printing the top half of the part and hot-glueing them together I'm going to save about 4 meters of plastic I would have to throw away. By extruding PLA manually I can easily fix holes and gaps in the parts and it worked before. It would be cool to have a beacon activated when all the parts are put together.

So i won a fubarino on hackaday a while ago and still haven't figured out what I should or could do with that thing. It's calling for something awesome but my head is full of blinking leds right now... I never really reached the constraints of an arduino with an atmega328, so I'm asking for ideas.

I still have a keyfob camera laying around and always wanted to make it fly. I frankensteined it to make time lapse pictures like a "drop and shoot for hours or days or years" device. would be cool to see it fly from my 18-floor house I live in, using some cellphone wideangle lenses I have to dig out.

BicyclePC

kind of embarrassing with all that tinkering I never made an arduino based bicycle pc. would be great to store your tracks and times on an SD card and it's just measuring the time between "clicks" from the reed switch. I may have an easy way to interface it with the web without hurdling around with apps, bluetooth and stuff but still be connected to your mobile one direction. All in all a bicycle pc nowadays should not stop there. It should be integrated with it's own power supply, be loaded by you through pedals, control the lights using light sensors and delayed off switching when waiting on a traffic light. It should be working without your cell phone, but even better with it.

Scorcher6x6

Found my rc car from the 90ies on ebay without any remote. I've already ordered a big motor bridge for the 2 500mA motors and a new battery and probably throw in an arduino with a bluetooth module and recreate the larsson scanner like seen here. There are some parts broken that I have to print in 3D, like a front wheel.

emiglio / emilio

I found it once on ebay and got it for around 10bugs. It's huge! I stripped the electronics from the head to replace it and the 2 shells of the head are fitting my head like a helmet (that's not easy - biiiig head). The gears are broken and I have to make a copy, probably make a silicone mold and cast it in resin, but thats two things i've never done before. I hope to throw in a raspberry pi in there or use my prize from the contest I won on hackaday once (a fubarino). I also found 4 PIR sensors in the garbage, still working (they were black and the house owner wanted white ones I guess) - saved me 20bugs.

solar turtle bot

I want to work with solar cells and 2-3 servos creating a little walking bot that seeks light and stays there and if the light is out it will retract its limbs and head.

tree climbing bot

I'm not sure whether it will jump from branch to branch or use some grappling hooks and other cool stuff... like pretending to be a spider.

R2D2

I'm ashamed to say that until this year I had almost nothing related to star wars laying around. Since may the 4th there is now a $0 lightsaber built and my project from the ewok movies.

LED matrix stuff

I ordered so many led matrices I wanted to use for clock projects or just liked their form factor so much... I got them in 8x8 and 5x7 in different colors and sizes. This is a stargate atlantis hommage.